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I'm reading Holisky & Gagua (1994), a grammar sketch of Batsbi. I just came across this sentence, "the words said by him remained toast". I like it, a lot.

I take it that despite some sort of condition or expectation, the words he said remained to best be described as speeches or hot white bread. Like some sort of uncle at a wedding who never stops talking once he's got the space. There is no more context, so all we can do is speculate.

Batsbi [bbl, bats1242] is spoken at the dot on this map below and transitivising affixes, inclusive pronouns and aorist.

I'm currently reading some older grammars that are written in a quite different style from most modern grammars. They're very ambitious, meticulous and good in many ways, but most crucial is the fact that they lack glossing. I miss glossing so!

Glossing is a way for linguists to divide up utterances and translate more fine-grained units so that other linguists can have a better understanding of what's going on. When reading a grammar and trying to understand how the language works, glossing is immensely useful and practical. You as a reader might be interested in different things from the author, and glossing makes their analysis more transparent and makes more information available to the reader. You can read more about it, and conventions for it, here.

LingQuest! How good are you at correctly identifying which language you're hearing?
Test yourself on over 30 European languages and other languages from all over the world. Included are many languages currently under study in the DOBES-program.Link to new…

This is a blogpost about the way that different linguists see the great challenges and aims of linguistics, it's full of quotes that I hope will prove illustrative. The quotes are taken mainly from here and here, you can also go there to read more. As usual, you're more than free to skim and scroll, there's quite a few quotes this time.

A few quick tips to people looking for jobs in linguistics, especially as students. I've recently been trying to help out some friends of mine who are looking for positions, and thought I'd perhaps share some quick tips that have helped me. Not that I'm an expert or anything, I'm just a tiny little PhD student who overthinks things a lot, but all the same. These might seem quite obvious, but I think they might actually be helpful still. Lemme know if you found them useful.

1) Talk to the professors, colleagues and bosses you like and let them know you're looking and would appreciate advice and support. Seriously, they might not have realised this and could be very helpful. Pre-warn them that you might need them to write recommendations letters.

We've had a new submission for Goodies from Grammar Reading - a series of blog posts with interesting, fun or in other ways noteworthy utterances found while reading linguistic description (blogger posts here, old posts on tumblr here). This one was noted by Siva Kalyan during Don Daniels' talk at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS 2015 in Western Sydney University). The example is taken from a collection of texts in Apalɨ by Martha Wade (Wade n.d.) and serves to illustrate the way this language encodes imperatives. The codes for this language are: ena and apal1256. Original text: Vac-ɨna huji hisi sɨmɨl-ɨlɨŋ u-avɨ-la-lɨ. Glossing: move.aside-2sg.ds underarm rotten smell-1sg.imp say-pl-hab-3 Translation: ‘“Move aside and let me smell your underarm,” they say.’ As utterances out of context goes, this is a most humour one. I was not present at the talk, nor at the occasion when this was said but I'd like to imagine it's a parent tryi…

The Ethnologue, the most widely used catalogue of the world's languages, has instituted a restriction on how much content is available for free on their site. After 7 data pages per month (excluding "navigation pages, indexes, and other "administrative" pages that you may need to access to get to the data you want to see") you will need to be a subscriber in order to access more. The cost is 9.95 USD per month, or 60 USD per year. This is quite simply due to lack of funding (cf Linguist Lists funding drives), you can read more about this in their official blog.

Humans Who Read Grammars

This is a blog by young linguists interested in diversity and description of the world's languages. We write posts about research and academia relevant to young linguists and sometimes also the general public.